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“The stars sure are beautiful tonight,”
Yugo turned, jolted from his thoughts as if someone had abruptly shaken the tree branch he was perched on.
Adamai stood beside him. He was taller – but he always looked too tall. Yugo could never quite adjust himself to it, no matter how many decades had passed. The dragon’s horns curved and weaved from the top of his head, like great branches of a tree with all their leaves missing. His silver skin became phosphorescent under moonlight, glowing as if she were his true mother, not the Goddess Eliatrope. Ad was in his human form – technically – but he never looked human. His limbs were thicker, taut with muscle, and his face had aged. Could dragons wrinkle?
Always too tall and never mortal enough, Yugo thought with an ebb of fondness.
“They’re always beautiful. But tonight is clear, so you can see them all,” Yugo replied, turning his gaze back to the heavens. A million stars blinked back at him in some great cosmic dance. It always made him think of his mother. Had she created the stars to be beautiful?
The branch shook – actually this time – as his brother settled himself. Adamai’s prehensile tail curled around the bark. Silence waned between them. Centuries sometimes made it difficult to broach new conversation topics. They’d given up on trying to find one a while ago.
“You’ve grown a beard,” Adamai commented absently.
One of their pre-tread conversations again. “I have before,”
“This one is longer. It’s like you don’t care to shave anymore,”
Yugo snorted. “Easy for you to say. All you grow are new horns come the springtime,”
“I can shave it for you, you know,”
“Do you not like it?”
A shrug. “You look too serious,”
“Why can’t I be serious?”
Another shrug. “It doesn’t suit you. Never has,”
“You want me to look like a boy again? Now which one of us is living in the past?”
“I didn’t say-”
“Do you ever look up and imagine that one of those stars could be our home?” Yugo interrupted. He didn’t care about his beard. He hated speaking of idle things. He had so much time and yet it always felt a waste.
Adamai sighed hesitantly, as if he had been trying not to. They’d had this conversation before. “We cannot return home, brother,”
“But why not?” Yugo demanded. He was angry now, he got angry so easily these days. Wasn’t there a time, years ago, when he was gentle and understanding? Had it been so long that he’d forgotten kindness? “We still have the Zinit. We can dig it out from below Ogrest’s mountain and fly back. We could gather the other Eliatropes and explore the stars. We can find Nora and Efrim again. Don’t you want to see them?”
“The stars or our siblings?” There was a twinge of sarcasm there. Yugo ignored it.
“Both. Everything. We can see it all. Stars and planets. Other races, new gods. We can vanquish monsters and save worlds again. Haven’t you missed that?”
“Of course I miss it. But we can’t power the Zinit without draining all the wakfu from the World of Twelve.”
Here was something new. Not to Yugo, it had circled his mind for years now, weaving a groove into his skull. But he had never spoken it aloud before now. Not to Adamai.
“I could do it,” He breathed, as if the very act of speaking would make the idea fade. “I could power the ship.”
Adamai whipped around to glare at him. Furious moonlit scales shone in Yugo’s periphery. He sighed. This was the reaction he was expecting, not the one he wanted.
“You can’t. You’ll die,”
“We cannot die,” Yugo reminded. Bitterness stained his tongue, a rage he’d known all too long felt tangible again. “You can join me. We can live again together. New lives, a new world. Eliatropes were never meant to be stagnant. We are children of the sky, forged to explore and create and find.”
“You’re starting to sound like Qilby,”
“I’m nothing like him,” Yugo snarled. He hated when his anger turned on his brother, his only companion. But Adamai would forgive him. He always did. He had no choice. “But Qilby knew far more than we ever could. He knew Eliatropes were born to adventure, to one day see our homeworld again.”
“This isn’t about our homeworld,” Ad hissed. A bolt of unease struck Yugo. His brother knew him too well, all too well.
“Look, if you’re concerned that using all my wakfu will leave nothing left for our dofus, you’re wrong,” He prattled, hoping desperately to keep Adamai from elaborating, giving voice to the unspoken schism that lay between them now. “I’ve thought about this. I’ll leave a little wakfu left, it’ll all return to me once I’m drained. It’s possible, I swear it–”
“You just want to forget them.”
Yugo stilled. A grief he had known for eons crashed into him all over again, a wave returning to an ocean.
It had been so long. He’d tried not to think about them. He’d busied himself with other things, other friends and new allies and distant lands far from the ones still stained with their footprints. He’d seen civilizations rise and collapse, wars fought over nothing again and again. He had seen cruelty and kindness thousands of times over, constantly at odds but never far from one another. He’d seen corruption at the hearts of men – power or gold or lust. Everyone had a vice and Yugo had witnessed them all take root, turning men to monsters. He’d seen weddings and funerals and births, so many that the faces began to blur and soon he was burying newborns and marrying corpses. He’d seen millions of sunrises and sunsets. Sometimes it pained him to think that he’d seen more without them than he ever had with them.
The world he lived in now was so different than it had once been. Nothing was the same and everything was the same. His grief was the same. He avoided forests and flowers. He got sick whenever he saw a sword, or a bow. Sometimes the simple sight of a kama was enough to make him isolate himself for a few years, trying to take up meditation. It never worked. He could not quell the adventurer that lived inside him, forcing his limbs to move and his mind to wander and his heart to ache for the unseen, for the unknown. And then he would explore again.
And, in time, he'd find some long forgotten trace of them. One that no one else knew or perhaps no one cared to remember.
And it was like they had died all over again.
“I can’t bear it anymore, brother,” His voice broke, a tidal wave shattering the hull of a ship. He too found himself sinking, but not into the sea. “Sometimes I find myself unable to remember what they looked like. But I can’t visit their graves. It’s too painful. They’ve grown moss now, did you know that? Amalia’s tree has reached the height of her father’s. There are so many more trees there now, so many great, dead Sadidan rulers who will never know her.”
“They have their history books. They’ll hear tales of the brilliant Amalia Sheran Sharm, the woman who shook the world again and again. You mustn't harp-”
“-Dally’s statue has begun to crumble. The Sadida don’t understand why they must till the land of a Iop they do not know, whose lives he did not save. The mighty Red Headed Warrior has eroded into a lump of wood. He’d probably find that to be some great offence, don’t you think?” Yugo chuckled softly. He had started to cry now. He felt all a boy again, seeing death for the first time as Tristepin faded into golden dust. But Tristepin wasn’t coming back this time.
“Yugo, you’re drowning yourself in it again. You must look ahead-”
“-I don’t know where Ruel is buried. I think he did so with his fortune, because the old vault is empty. Did he want me to find him? Was I supposed to dedicate myself to attempting to unearth his grave? Maybe he cast himself into the sea so he wouldn’t have to think about the cost of a proper funeral. Cheapskate to the end, eh?”
His eyes stung. Hot tears traced the curve of his face, twisting into the hairs of his beard. Perhaps Ad was right. Perhaps it was too serious. When had he become so serious? Where was that smiling boy that travelled the world with his friends centuries ago? When this world was an adventure, not a reminder?
“We can find Ruel’s grave if you want,” Adamai soothed, a note of desperation in his tone. “We can dedicate ourselves to looking for him for the next century. But I beg of you not to think about this, not now. It’ll only hurt you more-”
“-Eva’s gravesite is still well kept. Or, more than the others. The Percedal line is still alive, just barely. I don’t know where they are anymore. I’ve lost track. But I always know. A grin that’s just a bit too lopsided, green eyes too knowing, a freckle or two dotting tan skin. They’re always here, but they never know me and it’s pointless to explain,”
“Please, brother–”
“She’d want me to look ahead too, wouldn’t she? Evangelyne? I know after Tristepin died she was broken. She barely left her bed. She’d lost him before, but she knew this would be the final time. We all knew it. I visited her a week before she joined him. She looked so… wrong. Grey hair where it should have been blonde, freckles fading into the folds of her wrinkled face. She couldn’t hold a bow anymore. Evangelyne the Cra couldn’t hold a bow. If the gods exist – and sadly I know they do – they are cruel for this, ”
“Yugo-”
“-She knew me, though. I was worried it had been too long for that. She cupped my face in her hands and smiled and told me it had been an honour to live knowing me. She asked me to look after Elely and Flopin and Pin. She said she knew this was hard for me, but asked that I learned to move on. She didn’t want me weighed down by them. Funny, because Amalia demanded just the opposite. I remember in her final days she kept worrying I’d forget her. She’d asked what I’d do once I’d reincarnated, again and again until we started to argue about it. I don’t think we ever reconciled before she passed. But when I’d visit her, begging forgiveness, sometimes a branch would hang too low and brush my sleeve, or a leaf would drift down to meet my feet. And I knew – or I hoped – that was her way of accepting my apology.”
He inhaled, but all the air in the World of Twelve wouldn’t be enough to fill his aching lungs, to calm the storm inside of him. Adamai had gone quiet.
“I can’t bear it anymore, Ad," Yugo said softly. He felt so young again. Grief had a way of making even the greatest men crumble back to sobbing boys. "I see them everywhere, and yet no one ever recognizes their names. They’re everywhere and they’re nowhere and I can’t tell which is worse. I can’t stay on this planet without them. I never could. It’s taken centuries for me to realize that, but I’ve known it since they died. I can’t stay here anymore. I can’t.”
He shook his head repeatedly, trying to dislodge all his loss – his unending task.
It wasn't like he hadn't tried. He'd made other friends, eventually. New adventuring parties formed and friendship pacts made. Sometimes he saw echoes of the Brotherhood in them. But it was never the same, and soon every new friend met the same fate as the old ones. He had given up on friendships, or love. He couldn't allow himself to love anyone the way he had loved them. It hurt far too much when they left. So much love with nowhere to go...
He just wanted to forget that love existed in the first place.
Sharp claws suddenly grasped his hands, and Yugo twisted to look at his brother, unable to make himself keep going. Large, reptilian eyes gazed back at him. They were rimmed with tears.
“Please don’t leave me, brother,” He whispered. “I know you can’t bear to stay here, I barely can either. They were my friends too. But we are all each other has. We have a thousand other lifetimes to explore the stars. Please, live this one with me.”
Ad’s claws had begun to dig into his flesh, and Yugo winced. It was strange to see Adamai crying. He was ever the quiet reason to Yugo’s emotion. They had drifted apart over this, because Yugo couldn’t bear how his brother seemed so calm in the face of so much loss. But maybe, some centuries ago, Yugo had mistaken his brother’s silence for serenity, and Ad hadn’t felt the need to correct him. Perhaps he was hurting just as much as Yugo – he was just better at hiding it.
There's still one person worth living for.
"Okay," Yugo mumbled, averting his eyes. He really was behaving the boy tonight. "Okay, Ad. In our next life, then."
His dragon brother sighed, a spurt of smoke escaping his nostrils. "Thank you, brother. And don't do anything to speed up the reincarnation process in the meantime."
Despite himself, Yugo began to laugh. Really laugh. He couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed. Was it when Tristepin had mistaken an Osamoden prince for a bwork and begun throwing silverware at him during a banquet? Or when Ruel had nearly sobbed after losing a single kama down a drain in Bonta? Perhaps it was when Amalia nearly burned down the Sadida palace with one of her scented candles, or when Evangelyne became sick on a mission and every command came out in a cracked voice? He remembered laughing then, every detail as vivid as if the events were playing out in front of him. He remembered Tristepin's sheepish grin, covered in cake; Ruel spending the rest of the day trying to fish his kama out to no avail; Amalia insisting her brother had distracted her and the fire was really his fault; the blush that tinted Evangelyne's ears whenever she spoke.
He remembered sunsets capped off by a tale from Ruel, being dragged from shop to shop by Amalia, Evangelyne picking twigs from his hair with a gentle scold, Dally throwing him around as if he were a toy. He remembered songs and jokes and dinners once a year, after everyone had formed their own lives. He remembered Evangelyne and Tristepin's wedding, Amalia coronation. He remembered fighting alongside his friends, thinking, "If they fall, I fall. If they die, I die."
But he had been so focused on mourning their deaths, he'd forgotten to love their lives. And somewhere along the way, he'd forgotten to love his own.
"It wasn't that funny," Adamai mumbled as Yugo's laughter faded. A grin was etched in his reptilian face.
"I've missed you, Adamai. I've missed living."
"It's never too late to start again."
They smiled at each other. Brothers could be such a fickle thing, but Yugo loved his and he suspected Ad felt the same. Yugo turned his head back to the starry sky.
Now, instead of searching for a world beyond those stars, he caught glimpses of the world he'd always known. He saw fiery red hair and freckled skin and doe-brown eyes and toothy grins between every twinkling light. And suddenly, they weren't gone. They were here, they'd always been. He just hadn't been looking for the right thing.
The stars were beautiful tonight.